The Academy: because I never quite learned how to swim.

Than shadows began to gather;
first little furtive ones under the table,
and then bolder ones in dark panelled corners.

Transfixed in the form of Elemmírë she stands before him, watching as he simply casts thoughts into and at himself; idly standing amidst the earth and elements of the academy. She minds the silence, looking upon him with soft eyes; and of course change ripples through her (for Gaia is formless and the Primordium cannot remember what it used to look like when it lived). She stood before him with her chimerical bald face, but now she takes the appearance quietly of a slim mare, whose body is at ease. She is painted black and white with strange blue eyes, nothing special and nothing unique- only a solemn hymn of earth flowing through and around her as she notices his tension and change. He curses wordlessly at the soil, and she feels it, the shard burning in her hip yields her to destroy it but she does nothing more then chuckle.

“Perhaps,” she says with a slurred sort of Parisian accent, “that is what you should learn.” She nods, approaching him in a lazy manner, and pressing her maw against his shoulder. she draws her head back, glancing at him with mirror blue eyes. Curiousity rears its head, but alas she will not keep him long (she has matters of business elsewhere and although he is important, he is not her top priority) and so clears her throat as she steps back. At her side the fluttery grasses sway and a strange thing approaches them readily and quickly. It makes a noise most bizarre (like cogs in a machine turning the wrong way and clicking) and looks at him with its wild orange eyes. The beast is small, no larger than a wolf, coated in feathers of all sorts of colors with a whip-long tail; it’s claws sharp digging into the ground.

She casts an eye at it, the beast jumping and puffing itself up (looking rather like an inflated turkey); but turns to Phyr with a nod, “Find out why the soil no longer speaks to you, and tell me later what does speak to you, for now go find yourself.” She steps back, her shape same and one as she vanishes into the cold grasses; the batty little raptor at her heels.

PRIMORDIUM
earth-mother;